After Two Years, We Now Know What's In Obamacare: Poison

President Obama insists that his signature law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—known as ObamaCare—is a radical improvement. But there’s a crucial sense in which there’s nothing radical about it. ObamaCare is part of an unmistakable progression toward tyranny in American health care. The law takes us from partial to total government-controlled medicine.

Truman was the first to propose a government-run system and medicine as a profession has steadily, incrementally come under government control. LBJ created Medicare. Nixon, with Sen. Ted Kennedy, created HMOs. Even Bush expanded Medicare. And by now everyone knows that ObamaCare is modeled on a law signed by Obama’s leading Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

Over 100 years ago, medical care was mostly paid for and delivered in private. When a labor shortage occurred in World War 2, businesses competed for workers by offering health insurance, prompting Congress to tax the new benefits, causing a furor. That prompted Congress to declare employers’ health insurance expenditures tax-deductible, which embedded employer-based health care.

In 1965, Congress enacted Medicare. Politicians subsequently piled on regulations, causing costs to skyrocket while most Americans—especially the elderly and employed—were shielded from accelerating costs. Medicine, which had once been private, was distorted by government intervention. By the end of the century, government-controlled medicine—based on the idea that health care is a right—had prevailed. Step by step, America had all but nationalized its medical profession.

Rejected by 26 states and being challenged as unconstitutional before the Supreme Court, ObamaCare achieves the opposite of its stated purpose to ensure quality medicine; it is the culmination of America’s history of government-controlled medicine.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi infamously declared that Congress had to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it. On the law’s second year mark, we know that what’s in it is poison. We also know that what’s in it—based on the idea that health care is a right—is the end of a creeping advancement toward government-controlled medicine.